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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Wonder Stories, May 1933, with "The Great Oil War"
This is the second of a series of stories of the scientists who have revolted against stupidities and injustices of modern life, and who are determined to use their great scientific gifts to bring about a better social order, instead of swelling the profits of financiers and the war ambitions of political leaders.
In this story, our Technocrats turn their attention to the oil industry, and in a dramatic, vivid and realistic manner Mr. Schachner shows how a small group of determined scientists can battle against greed, privilege and entrenched wealth. And withal, we see a few new stunts in the realm of possible scientific devices.
THE American Petroleum Institute was in session. It was a bitter stormy session. The underground auditorium at 29 Broadway barely held the unruly mob. Passion ran high; it showed on the mottled red faces, the savage champing on unlit cigars, the voices cracked with rage. The casual beholder would never have believed that these men were the Titans of the oil industry, representing a total investment of twenty-five billion dollars.
The man on the platform could barely make himself heard against the rising tumult of sound. He was Wilmot, Secretary of the Interior, bearing a message from the President of the United States. He raised his voice to the straining point.
"The patience of the President is exhausted," he shouted. "You have consistently broken every agreement for voluntary proration of your oil. A few small independents among you have been honest, but the big companies—" he turned and shook his finger at the chairman of the meeting, "I mean you—and you—and you—have pumped your wells at dead of night, draining the common pools for your selfish enrichment. Small wonder the independents, in anger at your treachery, resorted to arms. It was illegal, but understandable. I believe you goaded them to it, welcomed the opportunity to wipe them out. As a result, the oil fields are a welter of blood and oil flowing unchecked from wrecked wells. The President has instructed me to inform you that he will introduce a bill in Congress to take over control of the industry."
At that, the confusion of sound rose to a full throated roar. Well-fed men jumped to their feet, shouting and yammering inarticulate things. The sacred rights of property were being attacked! It was Communism! It was worse! Here and there a small independent raised a faint cheer, and was promptly pummeled by indignant neighbors into silence. A few fist fights started.
The chairman of the meeting got slowly to his feet. He was old and leathery; the skin hung in loose folds on his face. When he spoke, his voice was hardly above a whisper. Yet every syllable carried; for a sudden silence descended on the angry, gesticulating mob. Harry D. Stoneman, Chief of Standard Petroleum, controlled over fifty per cent of the traffic in oil. His dominant figure cast a shadow over the entire industry.
"Secretary Wilmot," he whispered heavily, his body swaying for support against the table, "you are talking nonsense. Congress will never pass such a law, and if it does, the Supreme Court will declare it unconstitutional."
How well he knew it! the Secretary reflected bitterly. Old Stoneman and his kind carried the lawmaking body in their pockets.
"This country," the chairman's voice strengthened into a wheezy whine, "is founded on the rugged individualism of the American citizen; on his freedom to run his business his own way, without interference from the government. The oil industry is fundamentally sound, and as soon as certain meddling busybodies, both in Washington and in our own ranks, are eliminated, conditions will right themselves."
He sat slowly down, while a storm of applause broke from the assembled captains of industry. This was what they wanted; the freedom to be as predatory as they wished; to break the small independents, swallow the larger ones, rule with blood and oil under the benevolent aegis of Harry D. Stoneman.
The Secretary of the Interior shrugged his shoulders wearily and turned to go. He had told the President neither blandishments nor threats would move these shortsighted money men from their suicidal course. But he stopped short.
There was a commotion at the rear of the auditorium. Three men were walking swiftly up the center aisle in a compact group, pushing their way unceremoniously through the overflowing crowd.
A little ripple of sound followed in their wake, swelling to astonished gasps as they neared the platform and more and more men recognized the three. Certain unobtrusive individuals—Secret Service men to be exact—began edging their way forward unostentatiously.
The three men mounted the steps to the platform. Chairman had risen again, an almost human gleam of interest on his seamed countenance. The Secretary no longer thought of leaving. The oil operators buzzed with excitement! The names of the three intruders rose above the noise in tumultuous little leaps as each man explained to his less fortunate neighbor, who they were.
"Yes sir, that grizzled old fellow with the Yankee look is Adam Roode. Disappeared from General Power over six months ago. Thought he was dead."[*]
[*] See "Revolt of the Scientists"—Wonder Stories, April 1933.
"By God!" a portly man exclaimed suddenly. He was President of Colorado Coal and Fuel Co. "There's Harmon. Hey, Jonas, where the hell have you been? What's the meaning of this?"
"Who? The young blonde-haired chap? That's Cornelius Van Wyck; you know, polo player, explorer and all that. My kid roomed with him at Princeton. But he was supposed to be dead, too. Threatened to fight the Liquor Racket and everyone thought he had gotten himself bumped off."
"Say, don't you read the papers? Remember the list that was found in the Trust's offices in the Larkin Building after the big smash-up? Had these chaps' names on it with a lot of others."
"There're rumors they had something to do with the blowing up of the distilleries."
"And that airplane sucking out of sight above Ribling's brewery. Queer thing, that."
"They never found it again, did they? What was that convict banker's name who was supposed to be in it? Head of the Racket, they claimed."
"Melchior, Raymond Melchior. Very funny business. I'll bet those fellows had something to do with it."
"You're crazy," the President of the Colorado Coal and Fuel Co. exploded. "I know Harmon. He was my chief oil expert. Sane and sound as a nut. None of these radical, wild-eyed ideas about him."
"Well, how do you account for—"
"Must have been amnesia or something."
"There's a warrant out—"
"Say, Bill," said one Secret Service man to another, "think we ought to grab them now?"
"Better wait. They can't get away. Wilmot may get sore if we don't hold off for his signal."
Then the buzz of chatter died down, and the crowd craned their necks eagerly.
Old Stoneman was murmuring politely: "Mr. Roode.
This is a pleasure. Haven't seen you since you worked with my Foundation. And Mr. Harmon. Have to steal you from the Colorado Coal some day; you're too valuable a man to stay with them. Van Wyck, isn't it? Never met you before, but my daughter followed your goings on with considerable interest. Has your picture all over her room. She's twelve, you know."
They all shook hands solemnly. Then the oil man stared at them a bit quizzically.
"The papers have been full of you the last few months, but I won't inquire. Not my business. What can I do for you now? This is a private meeting, you know."
Adam Roode said slowly: "We have a message to deliver to the oil industry. We felt this occasion would be the best time and place to deliver it."
The ordinarily glazed eyes sparkled with sudden flame. "Hmm, most interesting. But we have an agenda of speakers. I'm afraid it would be impossible—"
"Let's get down to facts, Stoneman," Harmon interrupted brutally. "I know you and you know me. The message Roode speaks about will be delivered here and nowhere else. It's important—damned important—to you and every other oil man in this hall. Your nice little prepared speeches can wait. They won't want to listen to them if they hear us."
"And if I refuse you permission—?"
"So much the worse for you. You'll regret it—bitterly."
Their eyes clashed. The clamor in the audience grew. Secretary Wilmot walked over.
"Let them have their say, Stoneman," he suggested. "It's all very curious—" His eye caught that of the Secret Service man called Bill, and drooped significantly.
The chairman shrugged: "All right. It's highly irregular, but I'll give you ten minutes."
"That's all I'll need," Roode responded quietly and walked to the edge of the platform. A vast hush fell on the oil men.
"You men control the oil industry," he began conversationally. "Over ninety per cent of it is in your hands. Your combined word is law. Your investment approximates twenty-five billion dollars. That investment is gravely endangered. The very fact that you are now in session, that the Secretary of the Interior is here today, shows that you know matters are radically wrong."
Some one cried: "What of it?" but Roode paid no heed.
"None of you is making money today. Your oil, that sold back in 1920 for $3.44 a barrel now brings only fifty-six cents. What remedies have you proposed? Why, increased drilling, increased production. The result is that you are depleting the oil reserves at the rate of twelve hundred million barrels a year, and Wilmot's Geologic Survey reports exhaustion of all available reserves within five years at that rate."
"You're not telling us anything new," a man shouted.
Roode turned on him. "No, it's not new, but you're so blind that you don't seem to realize it. You drill competitively in a unit geologic field, with the result that every operator tries to be the first to exhaust the pool before his competitors. Naturally more is produced than the market can hold, technical efficiency goes by the board, vast quantities of oil and gas are wasted, and the field is drained dry."
"What do you suggest, Mr. Roode?" the chairman murmured ironically.
For the first time the old scientist's eyes blazed.
"Planned control of production and of distribution. The industry is not your private pickings; it is a vast public utility. You must pool all your interests, place them in the hands of a Board of trained technicians, strip yourselves of all power. This Board will operate all the oil fields as a common unit, allocate production to satisfy the market, introduce the latest technical methods so as to salvage every cubic foot of gas and every drop of oil that you now recklessly waste, and see to it that the consumer gets the benefit of our efficiency."
"What about us?" a portly operator yelled.
"You'll be taken care of better than you deserve," Roode shot back. "Your properties will be evaluated at real technological cost; and a fair rate of interest paid you on your investment, so that you can retire and play the races, or keep women."
The crowd was becoming angry. Men rose to their feet muttering.
"I suppose you'll be the fair-haired boy kind enough to take control," someone called sarcastically.
"Exactly," Roode answered quietly. "I and my associates and a staff of trained oil experts whom Mr. Harmon will pick."
The grumblings rose to angry yelps. There was a surge forward.
Stoneman rose and the crowd fell back, silent.
"Mr. Roode," he said, "you are a Technocrat." It was not an accusation; it was a statement of fact.
The old scientist pulled himself proudly erect.
"I shall not deny it," he said.
A vast sussuration went up from the assembled oil men, a communal sigh of astonishment that swelled into a full throated roar of rage.
"Damned Technocrats!"
"I knew it from the start!"
"Damned nerve, coming here and telling us what to do."
"Lynch 'em!"
Men scrambled over the chairs, pushing and shoving in their eagerness to get at the men who calmly acknowledged the hated appellation. Technocracy was anathema in the year 1938; confession to its tenets a penal offense. The solid business men of the country had not forgotten the bloody revolt of several years before.
Young Van Wyck and Harmon had sprung to Roode's side at the first sign of trouble. Their right hands rested in their coat pockets.
"We'd better be going, sir," Cornelius urged.
But the physicist shook his head. He raised his voice above the tumult. "I give you a last opportunity to consent. Tomorrow it will be too late. We shall take the industry from you and pay you nothing."
Already men were climbing onto the platform. The hall was a sea of angry distorted faces and shaking fists.
"Kill them!" The cry rose to a veritable chant of hate.
Secretary Wilmot was nodding frantically to certain key men in the audience. From all sides they converged, a half dozen of them, shouldering their way efficiently through soft, winded bodies. Bill vaulted easily to the platform. His hand extended to grasp Roode. "I arrest you by virtue of—" His partner reached for Harmon.
"All right; let them have it," said Van Wyck suddenly.
Three hands withdrew from pockets, bringing forth tiny pellets. Three hands flung them to the ground, and simultaneously drew forth latexed masks that slipped with a snap over their heads.
Bill saw the maneuver and reached for his gun. But it was too late. The tiny balls had burst with a soft plop. Instantly huge clouds of smoke billowed outward, enfolding, enveloping in a choking embrace. Bill's lungs coughed once, and he slipped gently to the floor. Within seconds the hall was a mass of ghostly white vapor, ominously silent. Heaps of sprawled men glimmered faintly in the swirl of white, stricken as they stood. Their breathing was slow, but regular.
"Fools!" Roode spoke behind his mask with vast contempt. "So much the worse for them." He bent his head over his right shoulder, spoke into the flat communication disk strapped beneath his coat.
"Dribble, Roode calling. Prepare Plan A for immediate execution."
"We'd better be on our way," said Van Wyck, "before the police arrive. McCarthy has the car waiting around the corner."
Three ghostly figures, wavering in the billowy smoke, picked their path behind stabs of light emanating from pocket-flashes to the exit leading off the side of the platform.
A reporter, fortunate enough to be standing at the rear of the hall, had dived through the door at the first puff of smoke. He raced through the corridors, out into the street.
"Taxi! Taxi!" he yelled.
A cab slithered to a stop in midstreet. The reporter piled in, slammed the door.
"Evening Mail," he ordered breathlessly. "Ten dollars if you make it in a minute flat."
Already the sirens of fire apparatus and police cars were wailing outside.
"Oh boy, what a beat!" the reporter exulted as the cab started forward in a wild leap that sent him sprawling.
THE great stratosphere plane, gyrocopter vanes whirling, dropped slowly over the wild Maine coast. The sea foamed in crashing rollers against iron-bound cliffs. The virgin forest stretched interminably inland, not a break in its upflung needles. As wild and deserted an area as was to be found anywhere within the confines of the United States. No ship disturbed the lashing fury of the ocean, no curling smoke disclosed human habitation on land.
Yet the plane continued dropping. At the hundred foot level, a strange thing happened. Directly beneath, the unbroken tops of pines and firs seemed suddenly to roll back, disclosing a square treeless area below, smoothed off to the level of a ballroom floor. The cabined flier sank slowly to the ground, quiescent among a half dozen other planes. At the same time two flexible curtains rolled swiftly out from their supports overhead, clamped into rigid tensity to form a continuous whole. The surface presented to the outer world was skillfully camouflaged to show the conical tops and characteristic needle formation of evergreens. A certain translucence permitted the filtering of a dim religious light into the landing field.
Roode, Harmon and Van Wyck stalked stiff-leggedly out of the plane. Pat McCarthy, former flying expert for General Aviation, redheaded and proverbially Irish, locked his controls, and followed out.
As if magic three tight-lipped mechanics appeared from the shelter of the surrounding trees, swarmed over the plane in a very ecstasy of tightening struts, cleaning sparkplugs, tuning motors. McCarthy lashed them on with salty tongue and gesture.
A young man ran swiftly out of the trees. He was Peter Dribble, Roode's assistant, himself an expert in atomic physics. His face lightened with pleasure.
"I was a bit worried. The ether's choked with government broadcast warnings, with your full descriptions. A fabulous reward is offered for your arrest. Every army, navy and aviation unit is checking out for you. Regular commercial broadcasting has been swept off the air."
McCarthy paused in his measured flow of profanity to laugh gustily. "Didn't even see a bird. The fifteen mile level's a bit too high for the Air Corps."
Roode said sharply: "You received my message?"
"Certainly. Mighty lucky Silversmith had the foresight to install those automatic rebroadcasting units every twenty-five miles along the coast, otherwise it would never have come through. But what with not hearing from you since, and the hue and cry out for you, we all spent some uneasy moments."
Van Wyck laughed. "They can search from today till doomsday and never find us here. No one even knows I own this tract."
"Get the Council together, Peter," said Roode. "We have work on hand."
"Righto," the young man answered cheerfully and disappeared into the forest on the run.
The four men moved to the left at a slower pace. Into the heart of the woods they went, following an invisible trail. A close inspection of the tree trunks, the spreading branches of seemingly innocuous bushes, would have disclosed a maze of very fine wires, so close together and crisscrossing so cleverly that it was impossible for an intruder to push his way into the forest without brushing up against great numbers of them. At a moment's notice they could be charged to carry fifty thousand volts, more than sufficient to burn a whole invading army to a crisp.
They skirted the side of a narrow ravine that ran irregularly down to the sea. You had to lie flat over the rim to see the deep inlet that connected with a still deeper channel of the ocean through the boiling rock-strewn surf. Neither from sea nor from air was the indentation visible. If you strained far enough, a submarine could be seen snugly at anchor a hundred feet beneath the overhang. A path led steeply downward, switchbacking cleverly all the way. Large caves extended from the inlet back into the solid wall of the cliff. In them the heavy machinery of the embattled scientists was housed; the complete power plant, stores of provisions and refuge in case of attack.
But the four passed the downward path, went on until they could hear the crashing boom of the surf far below. A long low building loomed in front of them, no higher than the surrounding trees, and constructed of logs. The roof was camouflaged similarly to the unfolding curtains over the landing field. It seemed but an unbroken stretch of trees. There were many other similar buildings scattered through the woods. This particular one housed the executive offices.
A concealed radio was intoning softly as they entered.
"Stand by for further instructions," the government announcer was saying. "Fugitives believed to have fled northward by plane. Northeastern units scour allocated areas carefully; report every fifteen minutes to liaison officers. Canadian provinces please cooperate, rewards for capture increased to twenty thousand dollars by Tideocean Oil Co. Victims still unconscious, fears expressed by doctors for their recovery. Signing off."
Dr. Kuniyoshi, the Japanese biologist, and Rudolph Chess, the German physiological psychologist, turned abruptly.
"Welcome, my dear colleagues," the German smiled broadly. "You are safe, yes. We listen to those fool reports. Those doctors know nothing, not so, Kuniyoshi?"
The little Jap bowed and smiled.
"Our sleep gas, it will last six hours; nice, healthy, refreshing sleep. They wake up fine. What you do now, Roode?"
"Starting serious work, Chess, but here come the others."
They were coming in, the Council of Scientists, by twos and threes. World famous men, each an authority in his respective field, who had deliberately outlawed themselves for the benefit of humanity. There was Stewart Peasley, chemist and explosives expert; Lee Randolph, former Chief Engineer of American Supermetals; Lord Wollaston, the Englishman who knew more mathematics than anyone else alive, and pursued photography with all the ardor of a hobby; Herbert Grace, steel and armor-plate; Lake Forrest, the submarine technician; Alfred Silversmith, supreme in radio; and Dr. Meyran, famous surgeon and inventor of the radio-knife technique. Only Cornelius Van Wyck was a layman in that group, but his millions furnished the sinews of war, and his daring adventurous personality had been of incalculable value in the smashing of the Liquor Racket.
Silently they took their seats, fresh from the tension of their laboratory problems. Almost daily, new secrets of nature were being disclosed, new inventions to be used in their unremitting war against the forces that held mankind in subjection.
Roode surveyed them with affection. He came to the point crisply.
"Just as we had expected," he said, "the oil industry will not submit tamely to be taken over and run on technocratic principles. They will fight. Old Stoneman is a canny chap. I believe, and so does Secretary Wilmot, that he has deliberately fostered the present chaotic conditions in the industry. He goaded the independents to open war. That will give him his excuse to crush them mercilessly and take over the entire oil industry from fields to refineries. We've got to crush his little game. It will take all our resources to do it."
"We did very nicely for the Liquor Racket," Van Wyck remarked.
"That was child's play to what we're up against now," Roode said soberly. "The Racket was a preliminary gesture on our part. To begin with, it was an illegal combination with not a hundredth part of the power or financial backing possessed by Stoneman and his crowd. We were able to employ certain forcible means we dare not use now. We cannot destroy oil wells or refineries; that would waste the very resources we are trying to conserve for the use of all humanity; we cannot blast our way into possession by open violence—we are not quite ready to cope with the United States Army. We must employ subtler means, within the law so far as possible. This is our first big attempt to assault the present system of things in favor of a Technocratic state, and everything depends on our success or failure."
A little murmur greeted his words. Put thus baldly, it did sound like an enormous task to tackle.
"But we have our plan," interposed Randolph. He had been one of the original Technocratic group before they were scattered, and it was on his energy surveys and charts that they relied implicitly.
"Exactly," Roode agreed. "Plan A; we've called it. Dribble has already commenced putting it into effect. We shall require Harmon for active work in the field, of course—oil is his specialty; Randolph for construction; inevitably," he smiled, "Pat McCarthy for fast aerial transportation, young Van Wyck for the shock troops, and myself for general supervisory control. The rest of you stick to your laboratories—there are certain pressing problems to be solved—I'll talk to you individually about those."
"You've left me out, sir," Peter Dribble called out. "Pm not much good for laboratory work. I'd do much better on the outside."
"But your arm—"
"It's knit very nicely. Dr. Meyran says it's better than new."
"Well, we'll see," Roode said non-committally. "Will those I mentioned please remain behind."
The little group bent interestedly over the special charts Randolph had prepared.
Jonas Harmon was doing the talking. "The oil industry," he explained, "has three definite divisions; the oil wells themselves, the pipe lines connecting them with the refineries, and the refineries. For our attack to be successful—and we must remember that time and surprise elements are very important—it is essential that we operate against all three divisions simultaneously."
He bent over the map. "Look here. Each black dot represents an operating oil well. You see they are scattered all over the country; but the thickest clusters are in the Long Beach area of California, the Seminole area of Oklahoma, and the Panhandle field in Texas. Over fifty per cent of our oil is supplied from those three fields. Paralyze them, or gain control of these key areas, and we need not worry much about the rest."
"How about the supplies in storage tanks?" Van Wyck asked.
"Control of the pipe lines will take care of that. See these wavy red lines stretching from the fields to the centers of population on the seaboards? Those are the pipe lines. Over seventy-five per cent of the oil gets to the refineries through them. Steel pipes of some sixteen-inch diameter, laid not over eighteen inches underground, running thousands of miles across the continent. There are power pumping stations every forty miles to heat and force the sluggish oil along."
"It should be simple to dynamite the main line pipes," Dribble interjected.
Harmon shook his head decisively. One could see oil was a passion with him.
"That would mean incalculable waste; the very thing we have banded together to prevent. We have methods already mapped out. Control or stop some four or five of these chief arteries and the balance will not matter. Here for instance is the great pipe line from Tulsa feeding through Chicago to New York. The Saint Clair interests control it. Another goes also from Tulsa through St. Louis to New York. That's the main feeder for the Standard Petroleum refineries. This one from Tulsa to Port Arthur belongs to Texarko; and from Long Beach to San Francisco to the Doremus interests.
"As for the refineries, take the terminals of those pipe lines; the tremendous plants at Bayonne, New York Harbor, East Chicago, Port Arthur, Texas, and Martinez, California, and you have the industry by the throat."
Roode took a deep breath. "According to our plans that will require about three hundred men. We have only one hundred here now, and at least half are essential for the functioning of the plant."
"I'll take care of the men for the three oil areas," said Harmon. "They must be trained oil men; couldn't use our present force in any event. I've been in communication with certain oil technicians I know in those fields, secretly, of course. They're fed up with the present state of affairs; willing to back me in anything I say. I didn't give too much about our plans away. They are even now gathering men quietly out of their staffs, ready to jump the moment we give the word."
Roode made some rapid calculations. "Some ten apiece for the key refineries; that's fifty. We can use men from here."
"I'll take care of the pipe lines," Van Wyck interjected. I can recruit fifty good, loyal men, no questions asked, within a week."
"That's settled. Harmon, I'll rely on you to pick up strategic leases on the outskirts of the oil fields; use dummy ownerships of course. Randolph, you're to buy and prepare the necessary equipment. That's all now. In a month we'll be ready to strike."
Some fifty miles north of Tulsa was an abandoned oil well. The gaunt steel skeleton of its derrick stared forlornly over a blackened landscape. It was the only one within a mile radius. But over to the east there were hundreds; sky-pointing fingers that stretched interminably to the flat, far-distant horizon. When the great Seminole area had proved its oil with gushers aggregating millions of barrels per day, a small wildcat concern, out in the cold, so far as the choice sections were concerned, leased this particular outlying lot rather cheaply, and sank a well with the eternal optimism of its kind.
At a thousand feet funds ran out, no oil had been struck, and the lease was abandoned in disgust, another monument to the prodigious waste of the industry. So that, when a quiet-voiced, nondescript individual sought out the original owner of the land, his tentative offer of an outright purchase was snatched at before it could be withdrawn.
Two veteran boomers, drifting through the oil country in a battered old Ford in search of employment, stopped their wheezy motor in front of the oil well in astonishment.
"Well, I'll be darned, Tom," said one, "if the old Emily dry-gusher ain't showing signs of life."
Tom shook his grizzled head. "There's a sucker born in the game every minute, Joe," he observed sagely. "That there hole's dry as a bone. I know; I worked on her."
Joe cocked his head thoughtfully at the high, steel-sectioned fence that was being run up by a gang of men under their eyes. Truck after truck lumbered over the rutty road, disappeared within the growing enclosure, streamed out considerably lightened.
"Some new tenderfoot took it over, likely. 'Pears as though they got money, Joe, and seeing as how we ain't got no jobs, maybe we kin help 'em spend it."
"Sure. No harm in trying," Joe agreed. "New outfits kin always use a couple of oldtimers like us. We got to git us a job right soon."
The old car bounced off the road, slammed up to the temporary steel door. Two men turned suddenly from idle contemplation of the landscape, stepped in front of the boomers' car with a swift precision that smacked of long soldierly training. Very efficient-looking gun butt peeped out of strapped holsters.
"What do you want?" one of them remarked evenly.
Tom smiled ingratiatingly. "We aims to see the boss of this outfit. We need jobs, and we're good oil men."
"Don't need any men," the guard said decisively.
"New outfits always kin use one," Tom argued. "Used to work on this hole myself. Lemme see the boss, buddy." And he stretched his long lank legs out of the flapping door, preparatory to alighting.
"Get back in your car and on your way, fellow," the guard snapped. "I'm the boss around here."
Joe's eyes glinted dangerously. " 'Pears to me, young feller, you aims to take a lot on yourself. When Joe Tuttle wants to talk to an oil-boss, no two-bit guard kin stop him." He jumped easily to the ground, only to find himself staring into the business ends of two forty-fives.
"I'm giving you just one minute to get going," warned the second guard grimly. "You're trespassing on private property."
Joe Tuttle stared thoughtfully at the guns and the determined faces behind them. He shifted his plug of tobacco to the other cheek and said casually: "You win." He climbed slowly back into the car, eased her deliberately through her gears and bumped back to the main road.
"Mighty funny layout," he drawled. "Take an old dry well, build a steel fence around her, and act mighty touchy about strangers."
"I hope they drill clear to China, bed rock all the way," said Tom viciously. "Let's go."
And the two disgruntled oil boomers drifted eastward toward the bunched oil wells, in search of employment.
WITHIN the steel enclosure, safe from prying eyes, were three men, for two of whom there were warrants for arrest out and who were the objects of an intensive nationwide search. They were Jonas Harmon and Cornelius Van Wyck. The third man, Peter Dribble, was as yet unknown to the authorities.
Workers swarmed over the place, unloading heavy crates of machinery from the incoming trucks, running up strange looking structures that had no obvious connection with oil drilling, hammering and clanging away at the partly dismantled derrick, putting it into shape again, rigging up drills, casings with wall packers, pumps, all the countless minutiae of well-drilling apparatus. But what would have struck old timers like Tom and Joe as exceeding strange for an outfit that hoped to find oil, was the total lack of capping or storage facilities for any gusher that might break loose.
Van Wyck surveyed the activity rather doubtfully.
"Sure we can strike the oil pool here?" he asked Harmon. "The engineer in charge showed me samples of the formations the old well went through. Says they're not even characteristic of oil localities."
Harmon smiled. "I'm positive. The Eötvös torsion balance, with my particular improvements on it, has never failed me yet. You see," he explained, "it is so sensitive that the slightest variation in the force of gravity at any point shows up definitely in the degree of depression of the instrument. An oil pool underground, with its concomitant layers of salt water and gas, naturally does not exert the same tug as the normal heavy layers of rock.
I have refined the instrument to such a degree that I can even calculate from the amount of pull just how deep the oil pool is."
"And we have one beneath us?" Van Wyck said eagerly.
Harmon shook his head. "No. The old company was wise in abandoning this well. The outermost point of the great geologic pool that underlays this entire area, and from which all those wells feed, is more than a hundred yards east of us."
"Then what—" Dribble started in bewilderment.
"I tried to buy or lease the land to the east," Harmon interrupted, "but it was impossible. Standard Petroleum and Texarko have renewable options on the whole field, and won't sell. They had to protect their wells from drainage by competitors. No doubt their geologists told them where the pool ended; that's why they left this bit of property alone."
"I still don't see—"
"Of course not; neither could the old line oil men. But I've invented a new method of horizontal drilling. I attach a telescoped drill at a ninety degree angle to the main drill. At the particular depth we wish to start, the power is shut off in the main drill and the rotary horizontal started. It opens automatically as the drill bites into the rock or sand; liquid cement of special hardening composition pours into the expanded part, stiffens, and gives thrust for the next drilling section. The drill I have here can open to two hundred and fifty yards, more than enough to hit the pool."
The young engineer in charge came over.
"How are you getting along, Milburn?" Harmon asked.
"Splendid, sir," he said enthusiastically. "I've dreamed of such a thing ever since I hit the oil fields. Control of oil by trained technicians who are interested solely in the scientific production of oil, and not in profits and cutting the other fellow's throat. Gosh, it's too good to be true." His face clouded. "I had to do a lot of things I didn't like when I worked for Standard Petroleum."
"And the men?"
His face lighted again. "Topnotchers, every one of them. Couldn't want a better crew. We'll make it, sir."
"There you are," said Harmon as the youngster hurried back to the job. 'These men had a conscience, only they never had a chance to exercise it. I only let them half way into the secret, and you see their loyalty and devotion. In time, as they prove themselves, we'll ease them into more and more responsible positions."
And the work went on apace; the high steel wall, the strange power houses, the drilling apparatus, the stream of trucks bringing up unending supplies.
At certain abandoned wells on the outskirts of Long Beach in California and in the northeastern section of Texas known as the Panhandle, similar activity might have been observed by an interested onlooker. Lee Randolph was in charge on the Coast and Adam Roode in Texas. Harmon paid flying visits at dead of night to the other operations, piloted by the omni-present McCarthy, and synchronized every step of procedure.
At last everything was ready. The men on the three jobs had worked devotedly, unremittingly, day and night. It was the evening of April 5th, 1938. Plan A called for the general attack to commence at dawn of April 6th. Reports came through on the tight-beam radio, amplified all the way from the key refineries by automatic rebroadcasting stations, to the effect that the crews of ostensible laborers were ready. Peasley was in charge. The men Van Wyck had hired to take care of the pipe lines were distributed at key positions, ten men to a crew, with all necessary apparatus, safely hidden against the day.
Harmon said wearily after a last tour of inspection: "We're all ready. I've given orders for the men to turn in and catch up on some sleep. They need it, and so do I. As for you, Van Wyck, luck! Five A.M. is the zero hour."
Cornelius shook hands, stepped into the small pursuit plane. With a whirring of gyrocopters, and the softest of murmurs from the synchronized propeller, he was off into the night. Dribble and McCarthy had left some thirty minutes earlier in the other plane. McCarthy was to drop Dribble outside Port Arthur and then wing all the way to East Chicago, to take control of a pipe line unit.
The great oil field was still and black in the moonless void as Van Wyck raced along at three hundred miles per hour. His blood tingled to the scream of the wind in the struts, to the soft purr of the motor, to the black shadowed masses of the sleeping earth beneath. Tomorrow, by this time, if all plans worked successfully, the world would be in an uproar. The vast far-flung enterprises of oil, the vaster conglomerate of automobiles, navies, and countless industries totally dependent upon a smooth, continuous supply of oil, would be helpless, drifting, Van Wyck tried to vision the totality of it, and failed.
He shuddered. So much depended on this particular step. Failure now would be disastrous; even success might lead to destruction by enraged industry with all the mighty forces of the government to back them up. He did not try to conceal from himself the fact that they were outlaws now; by dawn tomorrow they might be the victims of the most ruthless and far-flung man hunt ever instituted by the nations of the world. Riot, revolution, anarchy, as the nation's mechanism beat with more sluggish pace, were in the cards too.
It was a desperate adventure, with mighty stakes. If they lost, they would die, execrated, maligned; if they won, they might or might not be hailed as the deliverers of mankind. There were too many incalculable factors involved. Van Wyck shrugged his shoulders unconsciously, and grinned to himself in the dark. He must not lose his nerve; there was work to be done.
At one-thirty promptly, he set his plane down carefully on the flat prairie lands of Kansas not eighty miles west of St. Louis. A pumping station was located a mile to the south. A light flashed three times from the window of a typical farm house not far away. Van Wyck took out his pocket flash, flicked the trigger, passed his hand quickly in front of the gleam three answering times.
There was the sound of footsteps. A hoarse whisper seemed to lift out of the darkness.
"Who goes?"
"Number one."
Okay, Chief; we're all set, waiting for you."
Two dim figures turned and glided back to the darkened house.
Van Wyck followed.
Midnight of April 5th, 1938. The American Petroleum Institute was in session again. But the circumstances were considerably different from that earlier, stormier session that Roode had interrupted. This was a huge banquet, to be exact, in the great Blue Room of the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria in New York. White diffused lighting beat upon what had earlier in the evening been spotless napery and gleaming crystal. Now certain dark red stains suggested unsteady fingers in lifting goblets to the numerous toasts. Soft-footed waiters deftly filled each glass as soon as it was empty.
It was a victory banquet, a love feast rolled into one. Stoneman wrinkled and leathery, seated in the chair of honor to the front of the vast room, looked startlingly out of place in his shabby, unpressed dress clothes, his head a death mask in that arena of conviviality. Not a smile flitted over his face as some particularly drunken oil man, obsequious to the super-Titan even in his intoxication, proposed another toast to that peerless, that honorable leader, Harry D. Stoneman.
On his right sat Wilmot, Secretary of the Interior, no longer worried and distrait; next to him was Chase, Attorney General of the United States. To his left sat his chief lieutenant, Merritt, President of Colorado Coal & Fuel.
The speeches were over; cynical reporters snapped shut their notebooks, wondering how the hell these big wigs got away with it, yet pleased at the thought of the sensational headlines over their stories in the morning editions. Already some of them had slipped out to telephone. The great presses were kept open for the full story.
Stoneman had announced in his wheezy whisper the results of the deliberations of the inner Council of the big oil men. The war in the oil fields was over. Those of the independents who hadn't been crushed had hastened to accept the ruinous terms of merger imposed upon them. Control of the entire industry was centered in the hands of five men. Stoneman, Merritt, and the respective heads of Texarco, Doremus and Saint Clair. Stoneman smiled comfortably to himself. Merritt was his creature, and he had certain holds on the Saint Clair man.
The first results of the combine had been announced this night. After the usual mouth-filling phrases of law, order, the good of the industry, the welfare of the United States, had been disposed of, the speaker had proceeded to the meat of the matter. Production was to be sharply increased; the world market to be flooded with sufficient gasoline at dumping prices to force world competitors like Royal-Dutch Shell, Anglo-Persian and Russian Oil to come to terms. But within the confines of the United States, safe behind high tariff barriers, a new price schedule was to go into effect tomorrow. The price of crude to be advanced to $1.40 a barrel; the price of gasoline to the consumer to go up three cents a gallon.
At that, the assembled operators had cheered wildly. Whatever would be lost in the dumping war with foreign interests would be more than made up by the added increment on domestic products.
Secretary Wilmot had spoken favorably of the plan, largely on account of the possibility of our world domination in oil, and Chase had given the official blessing of the Department of Justice.
Stoneman should have been happy; the work of a lifetime was about to be consummated; yet he was not. True, rumors of the proposed deal had leaked out, and the World-Dispatch, only liberal newspaper remaining in the United States, had come out with a stinging editorial. Crowds of muttering, shabby people were congregated outside the sumptuous facade of the hotel, goaded to desperation by the prospect of further assaults on their pitiful incomes. But Stoneman had a vast contempt for the populace, and cordons of police were even now engaged in breaking a few heads to keep hungry men circulating.
Yet, for all that, Stoneman was distinctly uneasy. His whisper reached across Wilmot to Chase. That official was all attention.
"I am very much displeased with you, Chase," man wheezed.
"Why?" gasped the astonished Attorney General.
"It's almost two months and you still haven't caught Roode and his associates."
Chase laughed deprecatingly. Inwardly he was annoyed. Time and again the oil man had forced his Department agents to renewed efforts in a fruitless hunt. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? The unconscious oil men had all recovered without any ill effects; the threats of the scientists evoked derisive laughter. He refused to take them seriously. As for the smashup of the Liquor Racket, they really had no proof that Roode and his associates were responsible. Only that list of Melchior's found in the Larkin Building raid after his disappearance, with a pencilled warning scribbled on it, and the curious apparatus found in Ribling's brewery with evidences of a hasty withdrawal.
Strange enough, but not sufficient evidence on which to hang a murder charge in a court of law. Besides, the Liquor Trust had it coming. He had not prosecuted—there were too many powerful influences at work—but as a conscientious official he had chafed at supineness in the face of obvious violations of the law of the land. This oil deal, now, was another matter. It was within the law; it would give the United States prestige abroad, and domination of oil supplies for our navy. The social implications left him indifferent.
"Come now, Mr. Stoneman," he said, "I wouldn't bother about them. No doubt they've skipped the country. Their threats—bah—you're not taking seriously the talk of a bunch of half-baked scientists?"
Stoneman shook his head grimly. "I do, Chase. I've taken the trouble to investigate, which is more than I can say for your Department. Every one named on Melchior's list is a scientist of international reputation. I know Roode and Harmon; Randolph too. They're men of considerable courage. Van Wyck too, has plenty of money to back them, and he is not lacking in courage either. I don't like the idea of these men camping on our trail."
Two months have passed and we haven't heard a word more," Chase pointed out.
"That's what makes me more uneasy. I don't like this silence; it's too much like the deadly calm that precedes the storm. They are resourceful men, I tell you. The very fact that you've been unable to lay hands on them shows that."
Chase hid his inner rage. Was the old fool turned coward in his senility. His earlier career had disclosed no such yellow streak. Aloud he soothed: "If you feel that way about it, Mr. Stoneman, tomorrow I shall place every available operative on their trail. You may rest assured, if they are still in the United States, that I shall have them under lock and key within twenty-four hours." Stoneman nodded absently. He did not think much of the Department of Justice. Strange thoughts seethed behind that death mask.
"Merritt," he whispered abruptly. "I'm leaving for the Seminole fields at dawn. Charter a fast plane for me." Merritt looked at him in astonishment.
"But, sir, i-it's after midnight," he stammered. "You'll have no sleep. The excitement of tonight, the long journey will tire you. Can't it wait?"
"Don't be a fool," the old man whispered as he rose shakily to his feet. "Help me to my room and get busy with the necessary arrangements. You're coming too."
"Yes, sir," the President of the Colorado Coal & Fuel Co., said obsequiously.
PUMP STATION No. 96 on the great transcontinental pipeline from Tulsa to New York. The bleak plowed fields of eastern Kansas ghostly in the breath of an early spring. The slightest paling of the eastern sky, a long flat line showing the illimitable flatness of the prairie earth.
John Hornung, pump tender, yawned, stretched, looked at his watch, looked indifferently out of the window at the still darkness, yawned again.
Inside, the triple expansion steam pump pounded monotonously—thump—thump—thump— pumping the sluggish oil under nine hundred pounds pressure on the next leg of its long, transcontinental journey. Coils filled with exhaust steam nestled close to the main pipe line, heating the viscous oil to make it flow easier. Huge valves shunted the oil at will into a bypass for inspection. A man sat at a deal table, playing solitaire by the light of a single electric bulb.
Hornung got up, checked the valves, the various pressure gauges. Everything was functioning smoothly. He looked at his charts. The last of the Giant Well batch should be running through now; the oil from Painted Post was next on the line.
He turned the great valves, making a grunting noise. The other man did not look up from his solitaire. The pumps kept up their steady pumping. The oil was flowing now into the bypass, tremendously thick glass tubes. Greenish-black, dirty looking liquid coursed sluggishly through. He was in time then. Even as he watched, the liquor paled, thinned, ran water. He nodded in satisfaction, looked at his watch, looked at the pressure, noted them both down on his chart. The water slug had come through on schedule time.
Pipe lines carry the products of all wells from the area they tap. Each well pumps its product into the line, then a water slug is run in before the next well starts pumping. It is thus possible, knowing the diameter of the pipe, the time between slugs, the rate of pumping, to determine the exact quantity each well has produced.
John Hornung yawned again, sat down wearily across from his partner. "Still an hour before relief, Bill. God, this job is darned tiring. Nothing to do but make a few checks during the night, and look out at the damned prairie. For two cents I'd chuck it, and get me a job where something happens once in a while."
"Forget it," said Bill, as he placed the last king on the last pile with an air of vast satisfaction. "Lucky to have any kind of a job these days. Here, I'll play you a hand of rummy."
"Okay." John hitched up his chair as Bill started dealing.
Wavering shadows dissociated themselves from the mist that lay over the prairie. They moved silently forward, pushing between them a tank on rubber wheels. It made no noise on the soft loam. Very quietly they crept up to the pump house, its black mass broken only by a feeble oblong of light. One of the shadows peered in at the window.
Bill had just spread out his hand. He had gone rummy. His face was agleam with the exultation of victory, and his lips moved in soundless phrases.
The shadow slipped back to the other shadows, nodded its head slightly. A hand reached for the knob, twisted sharply. The door flung open with a crash. The white mist flooded in to meet the yellow glimmer of the electric light, swirled in confused hesitation.
The two pump tenders turned startled faces, jumped to their feet. The cards scattered over the floor. The door framed a half dozen very solid-looking men, features shrouded in black masks. Guns trained unwaveringly on the frightened oil men.
"Wh-what's this, a hold-up?" Hornung managed to gasp.
Bill edged surreptitiously toward the phone. If he could only manage to knock the receiver off the hook!
"Stay where you are," the masked leader said sharply. "You won't be harmed if you obey orders."
Bill relaxed. After all, life was worth more than the company's lousy pump station.
The leader motioned to two of his men. They came forward with stout ropes and carefully prepared gags. Within two minutes, the pump tenders were stretched out on the floor, skilfully trussed and gagged.
"You'll be all right," the leader said reassuringly. "Your relief is due in three quarters of an hour."
Then, while the pump men stared in astonishment, the invaders proceeded methodically to work. The steel tank was wheeled into the room. A long flexible hose emanated from one end, its tip was a wide flaring nozzle. An electric motor was attached to the rear of the tank.
The leader went swiftly to the pumping apparatus, shut it off. The machinery clanked ponderously to a halt. The stillness of early dawn flooded the room. Then he turned the valves that bypassed the oil. The tank was wheeled up, the flaring nozzle of the hose held flush against the outlet valve while it was being opened. As the oil started to gush slowly, the nozzle was clamped securely into place.
Then the electric motor was started. It activated a tiny powerful pump of the plunger type within the tank, building up a pressure of two thousand atmospheres. The highly compressed monatomic hydrogen in the tank was forced into the bypass, and from there into the main pipe line.
Van Wyck started the pumping machinery again. The oil commenced flowing again on its long journey under the Kansas prairies, carrying within its bosom trillions of atoms of highly unstable gas. The nozzle was unclamped, and a small steel ball thrust deftly into the pulsing oil. It moved out of sight through the glass bypass into the main pipe line. Then the valves groaned back into position, and all was as before.
So quickly and so efficiently had the entire operation been performed that not more than a pint of the crude had been spilled on the floor, nor had more than five minutes elapsed. Not a sound was to be heard except the pumping of the machinery, and the sparking of the electric motor. The masked men switched off the motor, wheeled the tank out into the early dawn, and disappeared as silently as they had appeared.
To the astounded pump tenders the whole affair would have seemed but an unpleasant dream had it not been for the particularly realistic bonds that held them helpless.
The minutes ticked drearily away until six o'clock, when the relief stamped into the room. A long stare of astonishment, then the quick slashing of ropes. Long stuttering explanations from thickened lips. Close scrutiny of multifold machinery. There seemed nothing wrong; the triple expansion engine clanked steadily and the oil flowed thick and normal through the pipes. Report to Headquarters by phone of the strange hold-up. Company detectives and State troopers promptly notified, but nothing unusual noted. Hornung and Bill went home, feeling sorely put upon, wondering.
Then—about eight A.M. the pump tender at Station 97 phoned Station 96. His indignation sputtered and crackled.
"What the hell's the matter with you fellows?" he asked profanely of Hornung's relief. "Can't you keep your blankety blank pumps working without falling asleep on the job?"
"You're crazy. Pump's working O.K."
"Not a drop of oil's coming through. The pipe line's dry as a bone."
Headquarters buzzed with messages. Reports of mysterious raids on five great continental pipe lines, followed by sudden stoppage of flows. Regional Headquarters galvanized into fevered activity. Corps of guards rushed to pump stations; widespread search for the miscreants. No traces. Only certain abandoned farmhouses could tell the story.
Repair crews on the heels of the guards; to find pumping apparatus in excellent shape, but wheezing on strangely solid oil. A greenish compound of the hardness and consistency of wax. Superheating caused a slight melting, but the oil refused to move. Opening of the pipe lines at spaced intervals along the forty mile stretches disclosed similar conditions. From station to station the oil was a single unified solid! The coastal refineries could not get any more oil!
Van Wyck and the others had done their work well. The four-inch steel bomb contained a mechanism for emitting measured electrical impulses. A tiny time clock set it in motion within two and a half hours, giving the hydrogen-impregnated oil a chance to spread completely through the pipe. The impulses, conveyed through the outer steel piping, impinged on the highly unstable monatomic hydrogen and converted it instantly into normal molecular hydrogen. Tremendous heat energy was released in the process, which, coupled with the pressure, reproduced the conditions necessary for the hydrogenation of an oil. The crude viscous fluid quivered, and became solid.
The idea was Peasley's; the little steel bomb the combined efforts of Roode, Peasley and Silversmith.
Frantic reports poured in upon the Oil Council's offices in New York. Reports of unparalleled disaster to the industry. The pipe line executives fairly spluttered. It would take a month to uncover the entire lengths of solidified pipe, and relay. Nothing else would help. But the catastrophic intelligence fell on already deafened ears. Other and more terrible news was pouring in.
"If only Stoneman were here," groaned the white-faced Texarko man to the half-fainting Doremus head.
But Stoneman as yet was in complete ignorance of the train of events. He was winging steadily westward by fast plane, unknowing of how his uneasiness had been more than justified.
Dawn in the great Seminole area. Hundreds of gaunt steel derricks against a muggy paling sky. Silence, except for the low distant roar of a gusher that had just been brought in, spouting its mingled gas and oil high into the air, while sleep-drugged crews worked frantically to cap the well and control the geysering waste.
But in the immediate vicinity of the old Emily Well, silence. Watchmen dozed in their huts, dreaming possibly of an age when there were no automobiles, no black gold to pour out of the earth.
Within the high steel parapet, however, there was no sleep. Every man was on his toes, tingling with excitement, tense with expected fruition. Young Milburn could hardly control his limbs; he panted slightly. Only Harmon was calm, quiescent; he, who, ordinarily, was a fountain of grim, restless energy.
"Gosh, I hope it'll work," the engineer burst out for the hundredth time. Then, seeing the swift drawing together of brows in wearied annoyance, he apologized hastily.
"I'm sorry, sir, but this is a big thing we're doing, and—and—"
"If it doesn't come off, a lot of people will be going to jail for life," Harmon completed for him. "I know; but don't worry. It will come off. Every man at his post?"
"Yes, sir."
Harmon looked at the phosphorescent dial of his wrist watch. Five A.M. Zero hour! At the same moment Roode in the Panhandle of Texas and Randolph near Long Beach were moving into action.
Harmon hurried to the mouth of the well. The regular drills had been taken out of the deep hole; a cast iron casing was sunk in their place, completely sheathing the orifice. The right angle shaft beneath was similarly sheathed. Its end, leading directly into the gas area, was capped by a gate valve that could be opened from above. Insulated wires ran down the length of the casing to connect in the ferrous bedrock as a broadcasting unit. The casing did not end at the mouth of the well; it made a right angle turn and continued along the ground to gigantic reservoirs.
Harmon took a final look around. Men waited at their posts, immobile. He stepped back and said curtly: "Current!"
High speed generators started humming softly in the power house. Blue flares danced momentarily across the dawn gloom. Deep in the bowls of the earth the current sparked across insulated tubes, and waves of extreme shortness pulsed through impervious bedrock and overarching cap-rock, through saline waters and wet gas. The short waves were ionizing the vast volumes of gas underlying the whole field!
Then Harmon said: "Charcoal."
At once huge compression pumps started forcing one thousand tons of dry powdered charcoal, specially activated, out of built-in storage tanks through the casing into the well, along the right-angle casing. The gate valve slid open and the superior pressure of the onrushing charcoal powder blew it deep into the light gas sands against the back pressure, forcing it further and further into the strata until the initial impulse had been exhausted.
Once more Harmon spoke: "Dynol!"
Milburn pressed a button. In the bowels of the earth, at carefully planned strategic points, capsules of dynol, the tremendously powerful explosive discovered by Peasley, detonated with a muffled roar. Up at the surface the ground trembled slightly, but Harmon knew that the explosions must have been terrific, setting up miniature earthquakes in the solid bedrock, lashing the bottom water to storm-tossed fury, agitating the entire oil-soaked strata, churning the gas sands and free gas into veritable whirlpools. A seismograph was at his side. The needle jumped erratically, showing the intensity of the subterranean convulsion. A stylus traced the peak of the earthquake, and stopped. The cylinder kept rotating on its clockwork mechanism. All was quiet. Then a faint rumble, and the stylus started moving again, a pale simulacrum of the original convulsion.
Harmon nodded his satisfaction to Milburn.
"That was the rebound from the external limits of the pool; the echo, so to speak. The time difference tallies with what we know of the area of the Seminole district. Our artificial earthquake was one hundred per cent effective; it must have driven the charcoal throughout the geologic pool, mixed oil and water and gas in one vast churn."
Milburn was excited but doubtful.
"The theory is all right; I hope it works."
"It must. There "is no guesswork about it. The induced earthquake mixed all three elements together. That in itself would account for a vast absorption of the gas in the other two elements. Then the short waves, shorter than anything known before, ionized the gas, rendering it more amenable to absorption. And the powdered charcoal, activated a hundred fold by Grace's process, occluded what was left of the gas area.
"Now you know as well as I that over eighty per cent of the wells still depend on the natural gas pressure to force their oil to the surface. This is a comparatively young field, and very few operators have installed pumping machinery to supplement gas pressure. It was not necessary. Look at that gusher that came through only yesterday.
"But with most of the gas absorbed or occluded, the gas pressure of course eases off. Remember, we didn't have to account for all of the gas. Drop the pressure inside the earth from its normal five hundred pounds per square inch to below two hundred pounds, and the reduced pressure will be sufficient to stop the flows. That leaves less than one-fifth of the wells—those with pumps—still working, and even they depend in large measure on the added pressure help."
"But couldn't all the operators install pumps?"
Harmon laughed grimly. "It would take at least two months and some twenty millions in equipment for this area alone. And Roode and Randolph are busy too."
"The wells will work again in a week in any event."
"Certainly," Harmon agreed. "But the operators won't know that. They won't even know what happened, or how. All they'll see are seemingly dry wells, permanently so, as far as they are concerned, and billions in investment going up in thin air. What with this, the pipe lines out of commission, the refineries sabotaged, they'll become panic-stricken. Even if they don't the nation, visioning stalled motors, idle ships, tobogganing industry in already troublous times, will clamor for action."
"So that it is all a bluff."
"Call it that. We must announce our terms and gain acceptance within a week or two. By the end of that time the roiled elements will have separated, the gas lost its electric charge, and the charcoal given up most of the occluded gases. Pressure will rebuild, and the wells start functioning again. The pipe lines would take a month to fix, unless they know our secret; the refineries a matter of a week at the most to clean out. Yes, it is a bluff, but with the cards stacked in our favor."
Young Milburn almost danced in his excitement. "Golly, it's tremendous. How soon will we know if the plan works?"
Harmon smiled at the youngster's exuberance.
"It will take at least an hour for the effects to be felt here; within the next hour or two reports should be in from all units."
REDMAN, boss foreman for Standard Petroleum, chewed his unlit cigar savagely. His bellow rose above the roar of the column of mingled oil, mud, water and gas that was shooting one hundred and fifty feet into the air.
"What are you," he raged, "oil men or bond salesmen? Here, you, Jones," he shouted to a blackened, oil-drenched individual slogging by in the ankle-deep sludge.
"Yes, boss."
"Why in hell ain't that gusher capped yet? A hundred thousand dollars' worth o' good oil going to waste. Dragging me out here in the middle o' the night because a parcel o' blankety blank fools can't even wipe their noses without a nurse."
"Sorry, but it ain't our fault. We didn't expect 'er to shoot for another day yet. And the pressure down there's so high, it's blowing every cap we're shoving on her as fast as we put 'em on."
"Bah!" Redman snorted. "Trouble with you is you just don't know. I've capped ripsnorters to which this baby is a puling lamb. Come along, I'll show you."
With that he bent his head against the blasts of sulphurous vapors and pushed forward as well as he could through the oil-running muck. The capper followed obediently, with bitterness in his heart.
An uncapped gusher is an awesome sight. The roar of the gas shooting up out of the bowels of the earth, the black vomiting eruption rising to majestic heights and dropping back with resounding splash, the ever-present danger of a spark, friction, anything, igniting that tremendously inflammable mixture, the stench, the tiny human beings swarming excitedly in an oil-drenched atmosphere, all make an unforgettable picture.
But pictures meant nothing to the hard-bitten foreman. He was there to cap exuberant nature, force it under control, save uncounted thousands of dollars. He met a crew advancing bravely into the roaring smother with a new four-way section. The bolts of the old one had ripped clean out of the casing.
"Give me that," he shouted.
As though his voice had some magical effect over the elements, there was a quieting of the vast gusher. The rushing noise softened to a rumble, the stream wavered, dropped to fifty feet, shot up again to one hundred, trembled uncertainly at the peak, and dropped back in slow recessions until it was a mere bubbling spring oozing out of the tortured earth. Then even that ceased, and the gusher was a thing of the past.
Redman stared in bewilderment, looked absently at the heavy section he helped support, dropped it with a resounding splash into the muck.
"Well, I'll be damned!" he stated with great fervor. "Jones, did you ever see the like?"
"Nope."
"A ten thousand barrel gusher, if there ever was one, drying up before you could say Jack Robinson!"
"Maybe it was only a pocket."
"Naw. No pocket ever shot that high."
They approached the mouth of the casing and peered down. Nothing—no sign of the precious oil that had emerged only moments ago in such reckless profusion; only a Stygian hole in the ground.
Redman scratched his head painfully.
"I'm going to the field telephone to call up Headquarters. They'll fire me sure when they hear this story."
But Redman was not fired—not just then at any rate. For Headquarters was being literally swamped with similar frantic reports. Even the pump wells were able to bring up only thin trickles. The Seminole district had gone suddenly, inexplicably dry!
It was in the midst of all this hullaballoo that Stoneman and his lieutenant, Merritt, alighted from their plane. It was noon. The field managers almost sobbed their relief at the sight of the frail, leathery old man. His feet had hardly touched the oozy earth before he was deluged with reports of disaster. Every moment the transcontinental wires brought in new tales of spreading destruction. The oil industry had ceased operating.
Not only the Seminole area, but the California fields and the Panhandle were dry. The sullen earth refused to yield its liquid treasures. The main pipe lines were plugged with a solid waxy substance for unknown distances. And now, to cap the climax, even as Stoneman listened grimly to excited tales, came more reports, veritable wails of anguish.
The great refineries were out of commission! Something had happened simultaneously to all of the "cracking" stills. Anhydrous aluminum chloride was universally used as a catalytic agent in the gasoline "cracking" process of the time. The batches of the pure chemical had been carefully prepared as usual that morning, run into the heavy oil stock, and heated as always. Almost immediately things went wrong. Instead of "sweet" gasoline boiling to the top within the stills, and the aluminum chloride forming a sludge with the impurities at the bottom, to the unutterable horror of the plant managers, the mixtures began slowly to harden until the stills were a solid, sticky, clayey mass.
It would take from a week to a month to tear down the tanks and get rid of the mess. Yes, samples had been analyzed. It seemed to be kaolinite, hydrated aluminum silicate, though how the silicon compounds had managed to get into the stills had the plant managers running around in circles. Had they taken on any new men recently? Why yes, they all had. Within the past two weeks. Come to think of it, almost all were laborers who claimed expert knowledge of the aluminum chloride process. Where were they now? Hold on a minute. Sorry, they seem to have disappeared,—the dirty so and sos!
"Sabotage!" Stoneman said wearily and refused to listen to any more. He turned to his panic-stricken field men. Already the other three members of the inner Council were winging westward from New York in answer to his urgent summons.
"I suspected that Roode and Harmon and their crowd were going to strike, gentlemen, but I never dreamt it would be so disastrous. There's no question of course about their complicity. Those laborers in the refineries were secret agents who managed to dump silicon compounds into the tanks. Just what they are, our chemists will be able to tell us.
"That's ordinary, understandable. The pipe lines were raided, something forced into the soil, a little steel mechanism too, that somehow solidified the liquid for miles. I've been in touch with our scientific Board and they are at a loss. We come now to something that begins to smack of the superhuman; the sudden stoppage of three great pools. No doubt about it; it's part and parcel of the same plan. But how could it have been done, and from where?"
The befuddled oil men looked at each other blankly. It was all completely over their heads. Stoneman looked around the silent gathering with withering contempt. He could expect no help from them, from anyone. The whole vast problem rested solely on his aged, sagging shoulders.
There was a little commotion in the outer office, the sound of arguing voices. Stoneman frowned: "Go out there, Merritt, and tell them to keep quiet."
The powerful President of Colorado Coal & Fuel obeyed meekly like any office boy.
He came in again. "It's two oil boomers they took on last week at No. 53," he said. "I told them to go away, but they insist on seeing you. Something important, they claim."
Stoneman looked thoughtful. "Let them come in," he said abruptly.
Two lanky oil boomers, dressed in oil-stained khaki, faces smudged, walked nonchalantly into the room. They seemed totally unimpressed by the presence of these high and mighty officials.
"What have you to tell me?" Stoneman whispered in his aged, weary voice.
Joe Tuttle looked at him with faint surprise.
"You Stoneman?"
The oil overlord passed over the lčse majesté.
"Yes."
"Waal," drawled Joe, comfortably shifting his quid from the right cheek to the left. "It's thissaway. Tom, that's my pardner here, and me, came wandering up from the South into this territory some two, three weeks ago, a'looking for work. We're purty good oil men in a pinch."
"Come to the point, man," Merritt said sharply.
Joe grinned. "Waal, anyhow, the first place we stop at's the old Emily. Tom, he worked on her drilling two years ago afore the company gave up. They never struck oil. Yet here she was, jus' plumb full o' men and equipment, an' a high steel fence round her so you couldn't see what's goin' on inside. Tom knows an' I know there ain't no oil in that hole, but if suckers want to work her, an' pay us, we're willing. But a couple o' wise guards with forty-fives chase us off the lot as if we were poison." He paused and squirted a thin stream of tobacco juice clear across the polished floor.
"Well, what about it?" Merrit asked impatiently.
"It just wa'nt natural."
Stoneman hobbled to his feet, his withered features glowing.
"You're right, man. It wasn't. Merritt!"
"Yes, sir."
"Get Storm, Chief of Police. Get Morris of our Aviation unit. Get Washington on the phone. Speak to Chase and Sturtevant of the War Department. Tell them we found the criminals responsible. Have them turn out every available unit and rush them here. We need protection. Don't stand there like a graven mummy. Hustle!"
He was a fountain of driving energy. His years seemed to drop from him; once more he was the ruthless, dynamic individual who drove through to the top in a highly ruthless, cutthroat industry.
He scattered his subalterns like sheep with a whirlwind of snapped orders. Telephones hummed with hurried messages, men dashed in and out of the office like mad. Within an hour the oil police, an efficient force of two hundred men, were lined up, fully equipped for battle, a dozen machine guns included in their armament. Overhead five bombing places hovered, ready for radioed orders. Washington had spurred into activity. Detachments were converging on the beleaguered areas.
"All ready, sir," Colonel Storm reported.
"Good. You're to investigate the Emily well. Have the bombers fly over it and cooperate with you. At the first sign of hostility, shoot—and investigate afterwards."
"Very good, sir." Storm turned smartly on his heel. Outside they could hear his barked orders; the tramp of many feet.
"Help me to the car." Merritt promptly offered his shoulder.
The attack on the suspect Emily was conducted in approved battle style. The oil troops came to a halt five hundred yards away, spread out in skirmish formation, unlimbered their machine guns. The bombing planes zoomed high overhead, reporting to Storm below. There seemed no sign of life within the steel enclosure.
Yet so wholesome was the respect for the scientists supposed to be hiding within that Storm advanced his troops very cautiously. The planes were to bomb the well only on signal. After all, it might be a quite innocuous outfit, and wholesale destruction and murder might have repercussions.
Still silence from the enclosure in the face of all this martial activity. The place seemed deserted. Storm was a brave man; he advanced alone. Guns trained on the walls, ready to fire. He stopped at one hundred yards, cupped his hands, and shouted. Nothing happened.
He took heart and went nearer. The planes zoomed lower. At fifty yards he paused again, uneasy. There seemed to be a faint sparking sound beneath his feet. He didn't like that sound. Storm was a brave man, but he was not foolhardy. He turned and walked back to his command as fast as he could, comfortable with dignity. Thereby he saved his life.
For suddenly there was a great explosion of sound. The earth rocked up to hit him; a great geyser of twisted iron, wooden logs, earth and stone rose high into the air. A huge volume of thick black smoke rushed after. Then for minutes the sky rained fragments. Half a dozen men were hit; fortunately no one was seriously injured.
When the booming concussion died down and the air cleared of flying particles, there was only a deep hole where the Emily well had once been. Nothing in the mass of twisted junk that remained could tell anything to the most searching eyes.
A dozen miles away an idly circling plane decided to go places. A depressed button on the dashboard, not a minute before, had sent out controlled waves through the ether that found the tiny pulsing apparatus buried in the ground encircling the well, and sparked them into ignition. One hundred pounds of dynol detonated.
Harmon put away his telescope, chuckled grimly.
"They may suspect anything they wish," he said to Milburn as the plane rushed onward to the Maine coast, "but proving it will be another matter."
That afternoon, the country, the whole world was in an uproar. Newspapers screamed their headlines.
TECHNOCRATS START THREATENED REVOLUTION.
OIL INDUSTRY DESTROYED.
PRESIDENT MASSES TROOPS.
At Washington there were hurried conferences, all that day and the next Stoneman and the Oil Council were closeted with the President and his Cabinet. Prominent Senators sat in, so did bankers and leaders of industry. Stoneman was frothing at the mouth. Feverish excitement made his voice stronger than ordinary.
"What sort of government have we? Why don't you do something? What's the Army and Navy for if those damned Technocrats can paralyze a gigantic industry with impunity? It's Revolution, I tell you!"
Wilmot, Secretary of the Interior, smiled inwardly. Stoneman was changing his tune; not two months ago he frothed at the mouth at the very thought of government interference; now he was demanding, imploring. But he said nothing.
Sturtevant spread his hands helplessly.
"We've done everything we could," he objected mildly. "Every oil area, every refinery, every pump station on the pipe lines, is under guard. Every available man is searching the country for the scoundrels."
"They're smarter than you are," Stoneman sneered. "You'll never catch them. What are we going to do in the meantime? Our best areas produce no more oil; even if they did, the pipe lines are out of commission for over a month; and the refineries couldn't refine the crude even if we did get it through."
"What do you want us to do?" asked the President somberly.
"Do?" echoed Stoneman. "I want the Government to take over the Seminole, the Panhandle and Long Beach districts, and pay us our book valuation for them. Then we want payment for the damage done, and complete freedom from government regulation on our other properties.
There was a gasp at the colossal effrontery of the demand.
The Secretary of State rose violently to his feet, his black beard quivering. He was known as a forthright man.
"This is the most impudent proposition I've ever heard—"
"Nonsense," the oil man interrupted brusquely. "Whose fault is the whole affair? The government's. None of you would take me seriously when I warned you months ago that these Technocrats were dangerous, determined men, with plenty of money to back them, and more science at their control than the rest of our nitwits put together."
He glared around the tense circle. "You've seen what they can do. This is Revolution, I tell you again. Do you think they will be content with stopping at the oil industry? Of course not." He shook a bony finger at the bankers, the big industrial chiefs. "They'll go after you one by one. Remember what happened back in '34."
THE big men blanched. They remembered only too well that time of revolt and bloodshed. Technocracy, which they had thought laid forever, was rising phoenix-like, to trouble their sleep once more.
"Stoneman's right," said Gerry, head of the Steel combine. "This is a matter that involves us all. The Government should reimburse him for the damage, take steps to squelch this thing once and for all."
The President's face clouded. He was about to say something caustic when the door opened, and Bisbane, Amalgamated Press Chief, broke in on the conference. His sallow cheeks were aflame.
"There's a message, Mr. President, on the radio. You had better tune in."
His eye lit on the grille of the built-in set. Without waiting for permission, he half ran over to it, twirled the dial.
A voice filled the council chamber with its calm tones. It was Adam Roode's voice, broadcast from a lonely mountain side in the Rocky Mountains, cutting across all wave lengths, filling every loud speaker in the country, no matter on what station it was set.
"This is Adam Roode, Technocrat," he said over and over again. "Please clear the air for important message to the world."
The President jumped to his feet, gave swift orders. Obediently every broadcasting station signed off, leaving the ether free to the outstanding criminal (from Stoneman's point of view) of the generation.
"This is a statement from the Council of Technocrats, of which I have the honor to be Chairman," Roode commenced. "Two months ago we requested control of the oil industry. It was the most flagrant example of stupid management and stupendous waste of any of our horribly inefficient industries. Furthermore, its purposes were definitely anti-social. To enrich the swollen coffers of Stoneman and his crowd, our natural resources were being dissipated at a rapidly accelerating pace. Nor did the common man, the consumer, benefit. He paid the tolls.
"We were refused, our proposals greeted with scorn, ourselves hunted as wild beasts. We waited. Two nights ago, the oil men, drunk with success, initiated a program that would have meant disaster within six months. Heavier burdens upon an already staggering country, war with the enraged nations of the world on whom Standard Petroleum intended to dump excess products.
"Something happened. A strange series of events put a stop practically to all production. How it happened we do not know, nor do we care particularly. There will be no more talk of dumping. There is no oil to be had. Possibly, if the gentry prove stubborn, the same series of events may close all other sources, in spite of massed guards.
"How long can the country exist without oil? Present stocks are limited; within a week they will vanish. Then—the deluge? I do not need to paint a picture; every sensible man can fill in for himself. We, the Council of Technocrats, are the only ones who know how to start the flow of oil again, smoothly, efficiently, with planned, controlled production, planned distribution, for the benefit of the nation at large and not for the benefit of a few men.
"We expect an answer from the President of the United States and from Stoneman within three hours. We know they are in conference. The reply may be broadcast from WEAF. Good-bye."
The calm matter-of-fact voice broke off abruptly.
The conference was on its feet, in the excited Babel of sound. Every vein bulged alarmingly on Stoneman's sere forehead.
"Find him, Mr. President," he whispered. "Now's your chance."
The President turned grimly. He did not like Stoneman particularly, but these Technocrats were challenging the majesty of the government itself.
"I've already started the wheels in motion," he said. "A half-dozen scattered stations have direction finders tracing the source of the broadcast. Ah, here's the result now. What luck, Leonard?"
The question was addressed to a keen-eyed young chap who had just entered.
"We've located it, sir." He spread out a map on the long table. A tiny red circle was drawn around a lonely mountain peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. "That's where it came from.".
"Good!" said the President. "Sturtevant, see to it that planes from the nearest field break all records in getting to that spot. They are to capture Roode—alive! Do you understand?"
"Yes, Mr. President. Denver is the nearest airport. My planes will be there in less than an hour."
He picked up a phone.......
But Roode was not obliging enough to wait. Piloted by McCarthy, the portable all-wave broadcasting unit snug on board, he was also speeding eastward to the Maine coast.
The studios of the National Broadcasting Company at Washington were crowded. Troops lined the approaches to the building, kept the vast, seething mobs at a respectful distance. Within, the air was surcharged with electricity. The President and his Cabinet were present, so were many others high in politics and in business. Within a glass-enclosed chamber, soundproofed, Stoneman, more aged, more leathery than ever, was standing before a microphone. All eyes were upon him; all hearts beat rapidly. He alone seemed calm.
The announcer saw the red light flash, nodded silently to the oil man. The air was clear for his reply to the challenge of the Technocrats.
His voice at first was low, but it gained in volume as he went along.
"To the criminals who term themselves Technocrats," he said. "You have tried to crush a great industry; you have screamed defiance to the greatest nation on earth. You plot red ruin and anarchy; bloodshed and murder. This is our answer—the answer of every decent and honorable citizen to your preposterous proposals. No! no! a thousand times NO! You will be crushed by the nation's vengeance, your bodies shall dangle from a hundred gibbets."
He ceased, and in hundreds of thousands of homes, intent upon their loudspeakers, hungry men turned to patient, wan wives; slow anger welling in their hearts, trembling for utterance on white lips.
But the loudspeakers were blaring again, so close on the oil man's defiance it seemed almost a continuation. Roode's voice, calm, matter-of-fact.
"Very well, Stoneman, I did not expect otherwise from you. I appeal to the people, the same decent citizens whose name you arrogate to yourself. Technocracy calls you to arms! Our battle is your battle! The oil wells are dry; others will follow suit; only we can start them again. The time has come for you to act!"
And the nation acted. Low sullen sounds that gained until they became battering roars beat upon politicians and industrialists alike. Once more the dread banners of Technocracy, long hidden under heavy penalties, appeared magically in the land. Bands of determined men started on the march once more for Washington, gaining snowball accretions on the way. There were riots, some bloodshed. Oil men went in fear of their lives, surrounded always by strong guards.
Men worked frantically on the pipe lines; their progress was slow. Hastily assembled geologists, mining men and technicians investigated the dry areas; probed, tested, proposed remedies. Nothing worked. At most the oil barely trickled to the surface, tens of barrels where there had been thousands.
Every day the Oil Council sat in session, listening to reports, planning futile campaigns against an invisible enemy. Nothing more had been heard from the Technocrats since that last radio appeal, but the silence was ominous. The Council remembered the last interval of silence. Texarko and Doremus were weakening; they were frankly afraid; but Stoneman was granite-like in his obduracy. Merritt and Saint Clair voted submissively along with him.
It was the fifth day. The country was a seething rioting mob. Oil supplies were being rationed out now; there was considerable hoarding by shrewd speculators with an eye to the future. The automobile industry was raising loud cries of anguish; sales within the week had fallen to a fraction of their former volume. Other industries, hit hard by the scarcity of oil, added their voices to the clamor. Still producing areas were worked to capacity; every available tank car and steamer was pressed into service; the small refineries ran day and night. But their production was not enough, and the psychologic effect was possibly even of more importance than the actual scarcity.
Well hidden in their sanctuary on the Maine Coast, the Technocrats waited. It was the fifth day, and there was no sign of the enemy yielding. In another two or three days the gas pressure would have built up in the devastated areas, and the oil would start bubbling forth. Even if they managed to elude the strong guards in other districts to halt production, the chief weapon in their favor, the mystery of seeming unlimited power, would have been destroyed. They could never win with those tactics again.
The oil situation in the United States had become a matter of world-wide importance. Foreign nations made it the subject of diplomatic representations to the President. Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch, Russian Oil, were speeding great tankers under forced draft to the American shores. Lift the prohibitive tariff on oil, was their song, and the country need have no fear of an oil famine.
Congress, or at least certain progressive elements in that body, seized on the situation with avidity. Senator La Borette introduced a special measure to remove the tariff on oil. And such was the temper of the nation that even members from the oil-producing states dared not vote against it. The bill had received unanimous consent for a quick hearing, and it was coming up for final roll call on the sixth day. Outside the three mile limit, a hundred foreign tankers hovered, waiting for the passage of the bill to dump their cargoes on American shores. Paunchy directors, elegant diplomats in the foreign capitols, rubbed their hands in glee. The tables were being turned with a vengeance.
That, more than anything else, broke Stoneman's resistance. He saw with awful clarity that once the tariff was lifted, it would stay off. The industry had been built on the basis of prohibitive protection. Remove that wall, and the whole house of cards would collapse. Even a low interest return on a straight technologic valuation, as the Technocrats promised, would be better than nothing.
On the morning of the sixth day he appeared in the broadcasting studios. The first of the marching bands was already at the outskirts of the capitol, sweeping halfhearted police opposition out of its path.
Stoneman's voice was no more than a weary whisper.
"We accede to your proposition," he breathed into the microphone. "The Oil Council is prepared to meet you and discuss terms."
In the depths of the Maine woods strained faces suddenly smiled. Famous scientists clapped each other on the back; Cornelius Van Wyck and Peter Dribble, by right of their youth, executed an intricate dance of triumph. Roode, eyes glowing, switched on a special microphone, spoke in answer. It broadcast on a tight beam to a re-broadcasting unit hidden on the slopes of the Laurentian Hills north of Quebec, there to be transmitted on a universal wave length. They were taking no chances on treachery; on direction finders being used.
"It is well. We shall require Stoneman as representative of the oil interests, and Secretaries Wilmot and Sturtevant on behalf of the government to treat with us. All parties must have plenary powers. You are to proceed by plane to the top of Mount Whiteface in the Adirondacks. At 6 P. M. you will be picked up and conveyed to your destination. You need have no fears as to your safety. But we must insist that you be absolutely alone. Any attempt at treachery or surveillance will only recoil on your own heads."
The great stratosphere plane drove silently toward the Adirondacks. McCarthy was at the controls, his reckless Irish face beaming with broad satisfaction. Van Wyck was the only passenger, humming a little air. He broke off.
"Expect any treachery, Pat?" he asked hopefully.
The pilot grinned. "I honestly think you're spoiling for a fight." Then he sighed. "I'm afraid everything will be peaceful. Stoneman's pretty well tamed. Here we are."
Whiteface loomed in the distance. Lake Placid was a shining irregular curve in the setting sun; Mirror Lake a tiny pool to the left. McCarthy threw out the helicopters and the huge plane sank slowly to the rounded, rocky peak. Van Wyck raked its bare surface with powerful glasses, his left hand resting on the machine gun trigger in case of trouble.
But everything seemed all right. Three tiny figures were staring up at them; there was no cover for hidden marksmen. As for possible pursuit planes, Pat wasn't worried. There wasn't a flier in the world that could follow him.
Van Wyck did the honors. He welcomed the three slightly bewildered men into the cozy cabin, and the plane took off immediately.
Sturtevant looked strangely at the pilot. McCarthy had been an American ace during the war.
"They said you were mixed up in this," he said slowly, "but I didn't believe it."
"Why not?" grinned the Irishman. "This is more fun than killing Germans or carrying mails." To which of course there was no answer.
"I'm sorry, gentlemen," Cornelius broke in, "but I am compelled to blindfold you. Our destination must remain secret."
The three powerful men looked at each other. Wilmot shrugged. "I for one am not here to spy, but I suppose you are justified.
The Council of the Technocrats was in session. The full membership sat around the great, soundproofed assembly room. Not even the roar of the waves could penetrate here. The three emissaries had been led in, their eyes unbandaged. The sound eliminator had been deliberately cut off as they neared the coast so that the pounding of the motors, the whir of the propellers, would mask the betraying surf.
Stoneman looked at the assembled scientists with open bitterness; Wilmot and Sturtevant with curiosity. These then were the men, pitifully few in numbers, who had successfully brought a powerful industry to its knees, who had defied the full might of the United States.
It is unnecessary to go into the complete story of the intricate negotiations, hastened on the oil man's part by fear of the pending tariff bill; on the Technocrats' by the dead line when the wells would begin functioning again of their own accord.
There was much wrangling and many heated words; a dozen times the whole deal seemed irretrievably off; but Wilmot was a deft mediator. By midnight the last detail had been arranged, and the weary, bedevilled men went to sleep.
Briefly, control of the entire oil industry from oil lands to gasoline selling stations passed into the hands of a corporation to be composed of the Technocratic Council, five outside technicians agreed upon by the negotiators, three economists of international reputation, Secretary Wilmot for the United States Government, and Stone-man as representative of the old order. It was duly noted that the Technocrats had a working majority.
The oil holdings were to be appraised at factual value by a commission of three experts of proven impartiality, and bonds issued for that amount to the stockholders in the conglomerate of oil companies. Dividends were to be paid thereon at the rate of three per cent per annum; two per cent of the bonds to be amortized each year so that in fifty years the entire issue would be retired. There were to be no other charges against the industry; the price of oil to the consumer to be based on cost. The Technocrats were to obtain official immunity for all past acts and alleged crimes.
In the morning a thoroughly disgruntled oil man and two philosophic officials, blindfolded as before, were taken back to Whiteface; while Harmon and Milburn, with several assistants drawn from the technical staff, proceeded westward to the oil fields.
Roode had said: "Take apparatus along, plenty of it; the more mysterious the better. Then let us pray the wells come through as we figured."
Van Wyck wanted to go too, but Roode refused. "One man is enough to risk. There may be a catch in our agreement, in spite of solemn promises. The temptation to break it would be too great if they felt they could seize us all in one swoop."
All that day and night there was no sleep. The Technocrats sat impatiently around their secret beam radio waiting for news from Harmon and the men who had been dropped in the stricken fields.
The following day Harmon's voice came through, jubilant.
"The trick's been turned. I set up the electrical equipment, gave the assembled crowd a splendid show of high voltage lightnings, performed a lot of solemn mumbo-jumbo. All day long I ground it out, sneaking looks at the nearest wells. But they remained dry. The theoretical limit we had set was already past. The crowd started to murmur; they evidently expected something in the nature of a miracle. I explained that it was a slow process, but I could see considerable scepticism. They dispersed slowly, grumbling, dangerous.
"The next morning they were on the spot again. I worked the machines like mad, but they didn't seem to care for the pretty effects any more. They were getting ugly; Stoneman had emissaries egg them on. I suppose he expected to cash in if we failed.
"Some one in the crowd shouted: 'Kill the damn fakers.' There was a rush. I picked up some hand bombs to fight it out when a man came running as hard as he could from No. 53. He was yelling at the top of his voice: 'She's in; she's in!' The mob ebbed a bit at that; then there was a wild rush for the well. I ran too. Sure enough she was gushing; within an hour the rest of them were pouring out oil as though nothing had ever happened. The oil men; engineers, boomers, laborers, think I'm a miracle man; they'll go through hell for us now.
Signing off; plenty of organization work ahead; picking a skeleton staff. Luck!"
Within half an hour similar reports came through from Milburn in the Panhandle and the man at Long Beach.
Adam Roode heaved a long sigh. Now that success was perched on his shoulders, he seemed terribly aged. The scientists filed in front of him, solemnly shaking his hand, rendering him homage. He had conceived and carried through the most tremendous undertaking in the history of the world. Technocracy was in control of a great industry. The rest was easy. They told him so.
He straightened up again, and shook his head decisively.
"You are wrong, my friends. We are only beginning. We must prove to the world by our management of the industry that we are worthy of control. That is infinitely harder than all the dramatics we have just been through. It is only the entering wedge. Coal, steel, electric power, utilities, banks, are all ahead. Their owners are even more powerful than the oil interests; they are warned against us; they will fight tooth and nail.
Van Wyck cheered. "Splendid! I was afraid there'd be no place for me in a stodgy, efficient world, but I see the millennium has not yet arrived. There'll still be fighting!"
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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